Kochi airport witnessed a breakdown of the coronavirus protocol on Sunday night when about a hundred raucous fans of a controversial ex-contestant of a reality show thronged to welcome him.

As Rajith Kumar walked into the passenger lounge on arrival from Chennai shortly before 10pm, the fans exploded in a cacophony of screams, whistles and adulatory slogans till airport security pushed them away.

District collector S. Suhas later condemned the behaviour of the fans and Rajith, who had allegedly joined the sloganeering, as “shameful for every single Malayali”.

Authorities have been urging people other than passengers to avoid visiting the airport as far as possible, apart from discouraging any kind of gathering anywhere in the line with the global virus protocol.

Airport sources said the fans had already been crowding the lounge gate for about 15 minutes when Rajith arrived, and the commotion that followed lasted more than five minutes before the throng dispersed.

Rajith, a professor of botany, is notorious for making misogynistic comments such as “women who wear jeans give birth to transgender babies”. He was removed from the Big Boss Malayalam 2 reality show, hosted by film star Mohan Lal, for rubbing chilly paste in the eyes of a woman contestant who had to be hospitalised.

“When the whole world is observing caution in the face of the Covid-19 outbreak, the way a TV reality show contestant and his fans demonstrated outside the airport is shameful for every single Malayali,” Suhas wrote on his Facebook page on Monday.

Sunday night’s protocol violation came just 13 hours after the collector had led an operation in the morning to prevent another serious lapse at the same airport. An Emirates flight had in the nick of time been stopped from taking off for Dubai and a group of 19 British tourists offloaded since one of them had tested positive for the virus.

The entire departure area, aircraft and the aerobridge were disinfected over the next three hours.

“We have booked four people (for Sunday night’s protocol violation) whose names are known and 75 others who can be identified,” Suhas wrote.

All the accused have been charged under penal code sections 143 (unlawful assembly), 147 (rioting), 149 (common object), 188 (disobeying a public servant) and 283 (danger or obstruction in public way).

Many social media users have lauded the collector’s action and sought stringent punishment for Rajith and his fans.

Navaneeth Krishna, whose Facebook profile suggests he is an SBI official, described the act as “one of the most irresponsible things during this time when we have to be vigilant every second”.

“This is the land of one man who sat at a hospital without seeing his father’s body,” wrote Shimna Aziz, whose Facebook profile described her as state vice-president of the General Practitioners Association.

She was referring to 29-year-old Lino Abel, an expatriate from Doha who had flown in to see his critically ill father but developed a sore throat on the way and voluntarily admitted himself to the same hospital, in Kottayam. Having been put in isolation, he could not see his father, who died the same night, nor attend his funeral. His samples later tested negative.

Suhas warned that acts like Rajiths’ fans would bring a bad name to the state’s people.

“Malayalis don’t attach more value to star-worship than to human life, but this act by a few would create a bad impression about Kerala’s society,” he warned.

“We cannot shut our eyes to such blatant violation of the law when religious, political and social organisations are standing up to protect the people.”

He was alluding to the way various organisations in the state were spreading awareness about the dos and don’ts relating to the pandemic.

The state government calls its awareness programme “Break the Chain”, in keeping with its appeal to every person with any suspicion of infection to take all the necessary steps to end the possible chain of infection with him or her.

However, Kerala has also witnessed acts of irresponsibility like that of a family of three who had concealed that they had arrived from virus-hit Italy and, for six days, failed to report their coronavirus-like symptoms. They are believed to have infected at least eight contacts.